Why do I hold myself to blame for my first years of existence?
I need to stop.
I was born in 1957, in late March to be exact. The third and last son of a career military man, who was sent to the Korean conflict 2 weeks after my birth.
For 3 years…
Maybe he wanted to stay away, maybe he was needed there. Who knows, and everyone who might have known why are long dead.
So at 2 weeks old we moved from the west coast to the Midwest, to live with family while he was gone. This was the first move of what was to be 13 more by the time I was twelve years old. None of these were small moves across town, but coast to coast and overseas.
For those first 3 years I was raised by my grandmothers in a small Kansas town as Mom went to work at the five and dime. My two older brothers are in school or off with the grandfathers fishing, playing ball.
When I was 3 my father returned from war. More promotions, more moves to follow.
2 more moves later my father asked for a divorce. I was 5 years old and don’t remember the fighting I was told of later. Maybe the years of playing war in real life turned him off raising kids and having a family.
But the word divorce was not in my grandparents vocabulary, and they would have none of it, so the marriage stayed intact.
The next move was at 6 years of age, when I was bitten in the face by a dog, and had to endure a weekly ferry ride into NYC for rabies shots. Remember the year and lack of any medical advancements with computer technology.
That same year I put my foot on the rear bicycle wheel being driven by my brother, riding on the back fender as always. This time the spokes shredding my lower leg until one impaled itself through my right ankle. 60 years later and there’s still a scar on both sides to show where the spoke entered and exited.
Then the move overseas…and the incident. As if the first 6 years wasn’t enough.
At the age of seven I was raped in an army hospital by another patient, a grown man taking a small boy into the washroom in the middle of the night to pee. I had been left to stay on my own, my parents assured me I would be perfectly safe.
I have re-lived that horror over and over in my mind.
The incident destroyed my life. I don’t remember anything for 8 months after, not until we were leaving Europe on a troop ship bound for the US.
The damage it caused can never be healed, I don’t think.
I kept that event buried for 30 years, when the guilt and shame and nightmares proved too big a burden for me to carry.
I was later diagnosed as having severe Complex PTSD, all the baggage of being sexually assaulted at such an age. It has healed. Despite my quiet screams for help.
60 years later and I’m still in pain.
My first thought of my sexual identity came at age 11 when I saw my first picture of a nude woman.
“This is what I will look like when I grow up.” was my only thought. Nothing sexy or risqué about it.
I was happy, elated that I would grow up to be this pretty, like this beautiful woman in the picture.
Those days they never showed “everything”, the world still prudish about the human form.
But that was the start of identifying as female.
Sexual awakening came during my twelfth year when I had my first encounter with another boy my own age. But the act felt completely natural, with my role as female.
There wasn’t any thought or idea that this wasn’t “right”, that this wasn’t the natural order. It was a heterosexual act in my mind.
That was my first 12 years. The highlights so to speak, if there is such a thing.
Would I have grown up with the same sexual identity, orientation, confusion, if the rape had never occurred?
Trying to answer that has driven me partially insane. Okay, maybe completely insane.
But can you blame that child? I need to stop doing so. I need to say that anyone else going through those first 12 years would have problems.